Demonstrators and protesters have been evident on the streets and on the pages of the Guardian Weekly. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

What a difference a year makes. By comparing 2011 with the rest of the Guardian Weekly Archive, it's possible to see which words have been statistically outstanding in a year's worth of the news. Do the same thing for 2010 and you can start to see who's in and who's out, what's up and what's down.

2010 seemed to be a year for individuals, with Abdulmutallab (the underpants bomber) and Assange heading the list of independent agenda setters. 2011 appears to have been more collective. This time the predominant group of actors has been: protesters, people and demonstrators (mainly in the Middle East), although Christine Lagarde's rise, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn's fall made the headlines, along with the mass murder committed by Anders Breivik in Norway, Julian Assange's ongoing problems, and Andy Coulson's fall from grace. Newly emergent entities were the NTC (National Transitional Council in Libya) and the islamist Al-Shabaab organisation in Somalia.

Countries up the news agenda in 2011 were: Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Somalia and Yemen; down the list were China and the US. Cities in the news in 2011 were: Fukushima (the Japanese nuclear disaster), Benghazi, Tripoli, Sirte and Misrata in Libya, Cairo and Sana'a, Deraa and Homs in Syria.

In 2010, the main international news was all about the Deepwater oil spill, the Haiti emergency and the Gaza aid flotilla. In this last year, by contrast, we have witnessed unprecedented protests, revolution and unrest in the Arab Spring, a major earthquake in Japan, and fallout from the phone hacking scandal in the UK.

On the financial front, bad news has continued, with consistent common themes: cuts, austerity, Eurozone and bailout. New in 2011, there is also much talk of debt, default, banks, GDP, the EFSF (European Financial Stability Facility) and elusive growth.

And what of our leaders? The usual suspects are still there: Cameron, Obama, Clegg, Osborne and Miliband, as well as Andrew Lansley, the UK's health minister, but we also find (in order of frequency): Gaddafi, Mubarak, Saleh, Gbagbo, Assad, Ben Ali, Ouattara and Merkel. Now which one's the odd one out?

Chris Tribble is a lecturer in applied linguistics at King's College London

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